Dealing with an airline that's lost your luggage and doesn't even know what city it's in is always a frustrating experience. One startup at the Consumer Electronics Show says it has the answer: a $50 cellular device that sits in your luggage and pinpoints its location.

The product is called Trakdot and was made by a company called GlobaTrac, which says it's in a pilot production run and will be sold to consumers in March. The device will cost $50 and require a $12 yearly charge to use the service, which lets you track the device on a website and get text message alerts about your luggage's location.

If a bag doesn't reach its intended destination, "the airlines don't know where it is," GlobaTrac CTO Joseph Morgan told Ars at the CES Unveiled event Sunday night. "If it ain't where it's supposed to be, they've lost it, they don't know where it is. They will eventually find it, but that doesn't give you peace of mind."

Morgan contends that using cellular signals is better than GPS, because with GPS "if you don't have a good view of the sky it can still get lost."

To locate itself using cellular signals, the device has to communicate with cell towers, of course. So how does Morgan pull that off? He said he operates a small wireless carrier called Aspenta, and has roaming agreements with the major carriers allowing the Trakdot device to work worldwide. We couldn't find a website for Aspenta, but there is a Federal Communications Commission filing listing Morgan as the owner of Aspenta in Georgia.

"We are a cell phone carrier. These devices only communicate with my carrier, and I have roaming agreements with the world," Morgan said.

Morgan is a 40-year veteran of the communications industry with experience at NASA, IBM, Delta Airlines, and more, according to the GlobaTrac website.

Besides simply locating your luggage on a map, Morgan has a couple other tricks up his sleeve. The device will also use BlueTooth to communicate with an app on your iPhone or Android. That way, you can watch its progress along the conveyor belt as you're waiting for your luggage. If it works, that's a neat trick given how similar most pieces of luggage looks these days, but certainly isn't as useful as locating luggage that's been lost altogether.

Using double-A batteries, the device should keep a charge for about three weeks if it's running constantly, Morgan said. It should work in nearly any suitcase, but perhaps not ones made of metal.

The device also temporarily shuts itself off during a plane's takeoff and landing, using an accelerometer to sense speed. "Right before the airplane takes off it goes into auto shutdown. It stays off for 20 minutes and then it comes back on in receive mode only," Morgan said.

While Morgan said "There are no guidelines about devices that ride in the belly of the aircraft today," he's worried that won't always be the case. "We didn't want to spend millions of dollars creating something that could get outlawed."

Promoted Comments

This is a fantastic idea! For anyone passing regularly through London's Heathrow Airport, this device will be an essential item. (Heathrow is notorious for regularly losing 100k suitcases at a time and, instead of returning them to their rightful owners, giving a standard low rate of compensation to each traveller while auctioning off the surplus luggage.)

Quote:

While Morgan said "There are no guidelines about devices that ride in the belly of the aircraft today," he's worried that won't always be the case. "We didn't want to spend millions of dollars creating something that could get outlawed."

—If any airline, airport authority or government tries pushing for these to be "outlawed" so as to pre-empt the embarrassing eventuality of the passenger knowing more than they do about the whereabouts of their luggage; we should vote with our feet. Please keep us informed.

Question 1: Could I also use this as a poor man's vehicle tracker? I presume that if our modest vehicle is ever stolen, the thief will steal first and search later (meaning, the device may confer some advantages).

Question 2: Will they please include some flash memory and a light meter (to make it a sort of black-box continuous recording device), so we can have evidence if our luggage is mishandled or opened, (or, additional evidence of velocity and deceleration in case of vehicle collision) and the timing of such events? I'm remembering my wife's hair drier, which arrived at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in no less than five pieces despite being well padded with clothes; and remembering a famous old news video where airline employees were caught on CCTV playing basketball with suitcases market "delicate", throwing them up and over into 8ft tall trolleys.

So you're the reason the carry-on luggage bins are always overflowing.

Seriously, if they're gonna charge for luggage, I wish they'd just charge for luggage--carry-on or checked. The current system has perverse incentives towards antisocial behavior, and the nominal checks on that behavior are rarely-to-never enforced. Just make it $1/kg (or some such), and weigh the carry-on bags, etc., as they go through x-ray.

The airlines are trying to create an incentive to use carry-ons instead of checked bags. For checked bags, the airline has to do the work. For carry-ons, much of that work is shifted onto TSA agents who have to examine your bags. So this "perverse incentive" shifts costs from the airline to the TSA, which is to say to taxpayers.

Anyway... I wonder how many of these will show up on http://unclaimedbaggage.com/ That site is also the answer to those of you who doubt luggage still gets lost.